Back to their roots

Visit Fossdene Primary in Charlton, south London, on a Saturday morning and you will find a hive of activity. It is the last day of term and around 150 secondary-age Sikh boys and girls have come to celebrate Sikhism and demonstrate fluency in Punjabi, a language they have acquired over the past year. There are dances and drama.

Teaching Punjabi is Iqbal Sanghara, who came to Britain in 1978 after taking a degree in education at the Punjabi University in Firozebur. When Sanghara arrived from the sub-continent, she was shocked to find the children of first- and second-generation immigrants unable to speak their parents' language. Paid part-time by a local Asian resources centre, she began running Punjabi classes in a youth club in Plumstead and for adults at Woolwich Polytechnic.

This summer, Sanghara graduated from Goldsmiths College with a community language PGCE, which allows her to teach her native language in mainstream schools. She took the flexible, part-time course over 18 months and becomes one of the first professionally qualified teachers of a community language. She says: "I always felt I was bridging the culture gap between these British-born children and their grandparents. A lot of my work in the past was voluntary but now I'm trained to teach English as an additional language (EAL) as well as Punjabi and there are lots of full-time jobs in Greenwich that I can apply for."

Community languages - the mother tongue of ethnic groups resident in Britain, such as Urdu, Bengali, Mandarin, Arabic and Turkish - are largely taught outside normal school hours in community centres and youth clubs. There are over 200 privately run community language schools throughout the UK and some, such as the Arabic School in Hounslow, have as many as 200 students. These schools are mainly located in cities where there are significant ethnic populations, such as Manchester, Birmingham, Leicester and Southampton.

Sanghara's Saturday morning Punjabi school is classified as a complimentary school, providing a discipline valued within the Sikh community but unrecognised in terms of qualifications. The problem with this kind of provision is that it is often unregulated and of variable quality. There is also a danger that community language teaching can stray into the realm of religious or cultural conditioning. Teachers who cross the divide may be communicating values or traditions at odds with the prevailing British culture, so that teenagers who want to adopt western values and lifestyle may find themselves confused.

This, coupled with the fact that schools are missing out on a valuable intellectual discipline, are reasons why many educationalists now believe community languages should play more of a role in mainstream schools. Jim Anderson, head of languages at Goldsmiths, says: "Before the Inner London Education Authority was disbanded, schools were making an effort to introduce community languages. Bilingualism was seen as an essential part of multi-culturalism. Since then, we've had 15 years of decline, with little pockets of good practice."

Cathy Wright, director of secondary initial teacher training at the University of East London, which runs a Bengali PGCE, warns that graduate teachers could be walking into a community relations minefield. She says: "When the sensitive subject of arranged marriages cropped up, one of our student teachers tackled the issue head-on by reading aloud from the diary of an East End Bangladeshi girl who was about to wed. It prompted serious discussion within the group. Like any other teacher, community language teachers have to make their subject relevant to young people living in the UK."

The Teacher Training Agency and the DfES-funded National Centre for Languages (NCL, formerly Cilt) independently support the call for universities to offer initial teacher training in community languages. The subject is normally paired with EAL or a European language - Spanish or French. Terry Lamb, deputy director of initial teacher training at Sheffield University and a member of the community languages advisory group at the NCL, believes that putting community language teaching on the map will be a long haul. "It's a chicken and egg situation. We need to train more teachers so that schools can put community languages on the curriculum."

The key to raising the status and improving the practice of community language teaching is to train native speakers to teach their mother tongue in conjunction with modern foreign languages or English as an additional language. At Goldsmiths, Sanghara has covered the same syllabus as any other PGCE student. But with a shortage of community language posts, she has had to learn to teach English as an additional language as well.

So where can you study it? Middlesex University, for example, offers a Turkish PGCE, while at University of East London you can study Bengali. London Metropolitan University offers PGCEs in Mandarin, Urdu and Arabic; Reading also offers Urdu and this autumn Sheffield will launch teacher training in Urdu, Mandarin and oriental languages.

Community language PGCEs look set to remain a minority subject, albeit an important one. Across the country, student places number less than 30. Contrast this, however, with the fact that around 300 different languages are spoken by pupils in London schools and, with large ethnic minority populations in cities such as Brad ford, Leeds, Birmingham and Bristol, teachers with a community language and EAL experience are a valuable asset. Sheffield's Terry Lamb believes that combining community languages with modern foreign languages will raise the status of both and could play an important part in halting the decline in numbers of pupils at secondary school who drop languages. He adds: "Pluralism in languages is a skill we should value."

The graduates coming forward to specialise in community languages are for the most part mature people in their 40s and 50s with a wealth of experience behind them. Validating that experience and paying them on the same scale as a teacher rather than as previously, on a teaching assistant scale, will do much to promote equal opportunities within schools.

Every language and every individual teacher brings an added dimension. Ling Dee, a Goldsmiths community language PGCE graduate, once taught English as a second language in China and Chinese to English businessmen at Nottingham Trent University. She has worked with a Mandarin linguist at Goldsmiths to develop teaching materials and a methodology suitable for teaching children.

Mandarin Chinese may not look like the most relevant subject that could be taught in schools, but Ling Dee has had an exciting job offer. This September, she starts as an EAL teacher at Kingsbury high school, in the London borough of Brent. Although fluent Mandarin was never part of the job description, the first thing that struck Ling Dee when she walked into the school were the numbers of Chinese pupils and a wall display recording a pupil exchange with a school in Quindao, in her native Shandong province. "When they learned I was from that part of China they more or less told me I had got the job. Next year we will be looking to exchange teachers and extend the scheme. And I will be running it."